Friday, November 16, 2012

P.S. Huff has good thoughts here. He makes a point that I agree with that ultimately any decision to go to war to stop secession is going to be part prudential, and that of course will depend on the circumstances. I agree. Some people in the earlier post have posed this as a "moral" question. To the extent that we're talking about the use of force, of course it is. But the moral question has little to do with secession. There's nothing immoral about secession (as far as I can figure there's nothing inherently immoral about treason or unconstitutional action either... although obviously an action could be both immoral and treasonous). This is just to say that the objection is political and ultimately practical. People have talked about it being a "legal" question too, but that to me is just another way of saying it's a political and practical question.

So yes - a great point. I just wanted to push the discussion a little farther than laughing at people promoting this pipe dream to thinking about what an appropriate reaction would be. My reaction is decidedly utilitarian because I've never really been put through this. If this were to actually happen, I might say "F*$& it - let them go". I don't know.

What I do find entertaining is a lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who always talk a big Lysander Spooner game when it comes to the state in the union suddenly don't have a problem with states declaring secession and imposing that on all their citizens.

Finally, I agree with P.S. Huff that discussions like this are healthy. It's also nice to discuss seriously to get peoples' minds past just thinking about the Southern Confederacy. I've said before that I think the trend is going to be towards federalized, global government. But on the way to that end state it's entirely plausible that we'll see realignments and such. So it's important to think through this.

UPDATE: More from P.S. Huff!! I apparently committ "old fallacies"! He's a little vague, but I think my "old fallacy" is that I don't repeat grade school (and I mean the low grades - I'm sure by high school we were talking about it differently) gauzy feel-good history. Somehow that doesn't feel like a "fallacy" to me. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were traitors to the British crown. Thank God they were. If it weren't 8 in the morning I'd propose a toast to treason right now.

*****

Jonathan also has thoughts. He writes: "Treason can exist in many forms, and secession ought not be one of them. At least, if we define secession as an act of treason, therefore implying that seceding American colonists committed treason against Great Britain, we should admit that defining secession as treason is not a good argument against it." Right. The revolutionaries were most definitely committing treason. I don't think there's any question about that. And I can't really blame Britain for responding how they did. Granted, there are differences in circumstance (some of which I highlighted a couple days ago):

1. We could plausibly pull it off
2. Unlike the Southern Confederacy, it wasn't a dumb idea, and also
3. It was a justifiable response to British abuses in a way that I'm hesitant to say for the Southern Confederacy or secessionists today. Secessionists today are treated as full citizens. This wasn't true of the colonists.

Granted, it was still treason. I don't think treason has any necessary moral content to it, but it does structure how political institutions respond. Britain could have quite reasonably said "yes they're committing treason but it is expensive to maintain this colony and we've been leeching off them anyway so in the interests of justice we should let them go - we have never accepted them as part of our political community despite their desire to be a part of our political community, so we have no business demanding they stay". You can't have that response to modern secessionists because they have been full participants in our political community.

25 comments:

Might makes right, in the end. American colonists had might (and French assistance) and so they were right. Southerners were weak and so they were in the wrong. One might almost point to the Sombart/Weber glances at the protestant culture and how it paints mighty and powerful as just and graced by the will of God and weak and feeble as damned and shunned.

The question if succession is morally just is nonsensical. There is nothing just or unjust for entities like nations and countries. Strong nations shall drown any attempt of secession in blood. Weak countries shall crumble and new nations shall therefore be born. Neither is more just than any other natural process.

The question wasn't whether secession was a morally justified act. The question was whether Daniel (and others participating in this discussion) would support suppressing secession by force. In other words, whether we as individuals would support shooting at other individuals because of the act of secession. Whether the United States as a state is moral or not doesn't change the fact that Daniel, you and I are clearly individuals who are subject to moral obligations.

I'm way more of a realist than most people, but seriously, it's a positive theory with a convenient level of analysis. Not a normative theory.

Now I'm not sure I agree - it's not an individual question (at least I didn't intend it to be). It's a political question. I would advocate the United States putting down the secession with force.

If the political question didn't turn out in my favor, I would not advocate individuals doing the work themselves (unless, of course, they were individuals in the seceding state - that is an important question for them to consider). I think you are taking the individualism a little too far here. Just because individuals are moral agents doesn't mean we can't distinguish between individuals acting collectively through institutions built for that purpose and individuals acting on their own.

Similarly - I support jailing convicted rapists. I do not support me putting together my own jury, convicting a rapist, and locking him in my basement for a decade. That's not the same thing. That's kidnapping.

I support the use of violence in suppressing secessionist insurrections. But what I, Daniel or you think, believe or want is not really relevant to the flow of such emergent processes as revolutions, secessions and creation of nations. I believe it is irrelevant what we as individuals think about such events because they transcend the level of the single individuals and their ethical judgments.

I think you misunderstand me here. I was responding to Roman's claim that because we are talking about state action, morality exits the picture. But ultimately even if the United States and Texas aren't moral entities and their transactions are amoral, your actions are not. So you would be morally responsible for voting for military action, signing up for the military and shooting at resisting Texans etc... Similarly, Texans would be responsible for their actions in shooting back, supporting secession etc... I wasn't taking a position with regard to whether the morality of your actions should be evaluated within the context of collective action. Simply saying that collective actions do not abolish individual moral agency.

>>But ultimately even if the United States and Texas aren't moral entities and their transactions are amoral, your actions are not. So you would be morally responsible for voting for military action, signing up for the military and shooting at resisting Texans etc...<<I have to point that I am an immoralist. Ultimately, we just create moral systems as we see fit, and there is no single unitary moral scale on which we could judge various events. For one, murdering a Texan is a heinous crime, for the other - a glorious deed for the unity of his country, for the other yet - a most unusual pleasure. And so on. There are going to be people willing and able to proceed with the acts of both seceding and suppressing secession.

"What I do find entertaining is a lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who always talk a big Lysander Spooner game when it comes to the state in the union suddenly don't have a problem with states declaring secession and imposing that on all their citizens."

This doesn't really work. The imposition does not come in at the act of secession, but rather at the likely imposition of a new government which declares those living within its borders as its citizens and ineligible to choose U.S. citizenship. This imposition need not happen however. In the case of anarcho-capitalism, everyone would have the option to request citizenship from the U.S. as well as the option to request from the U.S. that the land they own become U.S. soil. Whether or not the U.S. agrees is a different story.

But the moral question has plenty to do with the response to secession. Your original question was: "would you advocated suppressing secession by force?" I don't think you can just dismiss the moral question as being irrelevant. If there is nothing immoral about seceding, then surely, killing people for the act of seceding is immoral. (At least I would tend to think that it is immoral to kill someone who does nothing wrongful.) Sure, there could be overriding factors, but you can't just dismiss the moral question out of hand.

I refrained from commenting on the earlier post specifically because of the libertarian issue you mentioned. I think libertarians qua libertarians should be agnostic on this abstract issue. What matters is that the government be libertarian. Whether the government is State or Federal, is besides the point.

I think you're misunderstanding me, PrometheeFeu. The moral question is not irrelevant. I am saying that secession is not in itself moral or immoral. It is irrelevant when it comes to characterizing the act of secession. It is certainly relevant in assessing what to do in any particular case.

re: "Unless by "irrelevant" you meant that secession is morally neutral in and of itself."

Yes, that's all I've said. On whether the question of doing something is a moral one I said "of course it is". Then I went on to say that when it comes to secession itself it's irrelevant. There is nothing moral or immoral about severing political ties. It all depends on how, why, and to what effect it is being done.

"George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were traitors to the British crown. Thank God they were."

Quite so. Without the American Revolution, the United States might now be a socialist hell hole like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And slavery might have been eliminated in the 1830s by the Imperial government with a number of negative results including the loss of that character building event known as the American Civil War. No Battle of Gettysburg, no march to the sea.

Even if you're right about that, you're still wrong that it would have avoided war. The Confederates seceded because a man was elected president who explicitly and repeatedly said that he only wanted to contain slavery, not abolish it. And you honestly believe they wouldn't have rebelled if England had tried to simply abolish it by imperial order?

Daniel, I think it is somewhat misleading to characterize secession as morally neutral. It's a baseline thing dealing with presumptions and who bears the burden of justification. We need to keep in mind that “morally permissible” is not a neutral stance. A helpful analogy would be to marriage and divorce. At one point in time, many legal systems held a presumption in favor of continuing the relationship. If you wanted a divorce, you had to "show cause" or something along those lines. This has changed (in most places anyway). Now the presumption (perhaps conclusive) is that if one party wants to end the marriage, no further justification is needed. With regards to secession, where you place the justificatory burden likely depends upon certain assumptions regarding the status quo, which can bias one's perspective of secession in general. This is particularly problematic here because it is likely that in addition to the mere desire to end the political relationship, one party will claim that the currently existing legal-political order is illegitimate or morally defective in some way. So it comes down to which party bears the burden of proof regarding the legitimacy of the currently-existing scheme. This is important because we can all recognize that many cases are difficult to assess. If it is very hard to come to agreement (legitimate vs. illegitimate), then where you place the justificatory burden will make all the difference. And this decision likely comes down to how one views secession qua secession, similar to how one viewed divorce qua divorce. If one thinks that there is nothing wrong with divorce in general, then you are likely to find a presumption in favor of divorce. If one thinks there is nothing wrong with secession, then you will likely find a presumption in favor of secession.

Would it make it easier to accept if the state that seceded was majority Mexican-American? TFR is much higher for them than for Anglos and with at least another amnesty approaching, illegal immigration will rise, leading to faster growth (TFR of immigrant Mexicans is about 4 compared to sub-replacement for Anglos). We know that some southern border states will be majority Hispanic soon.

It would be a lot harder for lefty pundits and wonks to advocate mass killings of Hispanic secessionists than Anglo secessionists. The US may have already reached peak sq footage; there's no reason it can't get a little of what the USSR got.